This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 23: When Nothing Means Something. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 23 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch, and today we’re talking about how nothingness fits into language. But first: We’re very excited to announce the location for our live show, thanks to meeting our latest goal on Patreon, which we announced first in the bonus episode and now you get to find out here!

Lauren: So our last live show was in Gretchen’s hometown of Montreal and we decided it’s only fair that our next official show means that I get to repay the favour, and so we’re going to have it in my hometown of Melbourne.

Gretchen: I’m so excited to get to go to Australia. I have never been to Australia before.

Lauren: I’m so excited to show you around Melbourne when you come to visit.

Gretchen: I wanna see a kangaroo – maybe not in Melbourne, I hear they’re not super urban.

Lauren: That’s okay. We have zoos. You’ll get to see kangaroos.

Gretchen: Okay, okay. This is important, I’m also very excited to be going to the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language Summer School in Canberra and the annual Australian Linguistic Society Conference in Adelaide, where I’m going to be talking about linguistics communication, doing workshops there, and if anyone else in Australia is listening to this and wants to invite me to do an event, now’s your chance!

Lauren: We will have more details about the date and location of the live show, should be sometime in November, and, hopefully, some other events that we can do while we have Gretchen in the country.

Gretchen: I’m super excited to spend a bunch of time there. I’m sure the weather will be much nicer than Montreal in November. I’ll get all the sunshine. And, yeah, looking forward to meeting a bunch of Australian linguists.

Lauren: The live show is all thanks to our amazing patrons who support us on Patreon. Our latest bonus episode for them was an inside view into the conference circuit. Gretchen and I had caught up about what we’ve been up to over the last couple of months of conferencing. That episode is available on patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: So you can hear about the two different emoji conferences that I went to, and the gesture conference and the International Congress of Linguists that Lauren went to, as well as 17 previous bonus episodes, which is quite a lot of bonus material, if you go to Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

[Music]

Lauren: Today we’re gonna talk about nothing! And it’s gonna be great.

Gretchen: Actually, this whole episode is just us not saying anything. The rest of it is just silence.

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